Law and Order II - Double or Nothing

The Law and Order series is a mystery-adventure game where you try to unravel the clues and bring the guilty party to justice. It features exceptional acting by the real cast!

You don't have to watch the show to enjoy the game. In essence it's broken into two parts. In part 1, you're a detective and trying to solve a murder case. A well respected doctor is found shot in the head outside an apartment building. It's rather grisly, but you start searching.

In part 2, you have tracked down a suspect and are now trying to prosecute him in court. So you use the evidence from before and question the various witnesses to prove the guy is guilty.

The game is in essence the same as the first release (Dead on the Money) so the complaints and praise are pretty much similar. On the good side, you have a great cast, great acting and great plot line. So the game really does feel like you're in a well done TV drama and meeting interesting, multi-dimensional people.

The puzzles are fun and challenging, and make sense in the context of the game. The ambient sounds and graphics are both rather good - when you're poking around an apartment, you hear footsteps outside as someone else heads to their room.

On the downside, though, there is an AWFUL lots of mouse-waving around as you try to search every tiny little nook and cranny for things to examine in the various locations. If you don't click on the exact PIXEL of the item - even if you do have the "help" of turning the magnifying glass on - you miss it! Like real life, there are TONS of things to investigate in the room, and 99% of them are meaningless to the case. But it gets REALLY tedious to have to hear the reports of "Sorry, I examined this as much as I could and just didn't find anything." over and over again from your team. I would REALLY just like to get a written report of what was WORTHY and then be able to click on those things that were interesting to hear more about them.

In the same vein, your "inventory of objects" is limited. So you have to *throw away* evidence to pick up more!! Talk about bad police work!! You spend half your case throwing away things and hoping you don't need them later on. Why not have some sort of "police locker" to store them in until later just in case?

Also, some of the questions were blatantly obnoxious and not ones I would ask a witness. But the game would get to the point where the "other options" would start to cycle through questions you'd already asked and in essence they force you to ask the obnoxious one. There should be choices on how to end an interview - and pissing off your witness shouldn't be the ONLY one.

Finally, I play a TON of games on my system and usually don't have any trouble at all. But the video on this kept *vanishing* completely - and it happened in both windowed and full screen mode. I would have to completely shut down and restart the game to fix it ... for a while. Eventually it would happen again.

Still, it's fun to put the pieces together and figure out just who did what with who in what location. There are fun twists and turns and things aren't always as they appear to be. So I'd say when you play this game don't expect a "quick zip through" - sit down, be very patience, be prepared to reboot the game a few times, drink a glass of wine. You'll find that if you take it slow, the game is quite fun and worth the time!